


At Least He's Safe and Happy

by drneroisgod



Category: H.I.V.E. Series - Mark Walden
Genre: Gen, Or not, Psychological Trauma, depends on how you read the story!, otto is dealing with the bad things that happen to him, timeline: post-escape velocity, timeline: post-rogue, timeline: pre-hive, trauma & stress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:47:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28351149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drneroisgod/pseuds/drneroisgod
Summary: “The staff at the library would joke with each other about the odd little boy who just sat on the floor, surrounded by piles of books and papers, pretending to read. Perhaps he’s not quite right in the head, they would say to each other, but at least he’s safe and happy here.” –Mark Walden, H.I.V.E.
Relationships: Laura Brand & Otto Malpense, Otto Malpense & Franz Argentblum, Otto Malpense & Nigel Darkdoom, Otto Malpense & Shelby Trinity, Wing Fanchu & Otto Malpense
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9
Collections: H.I.V.E. Gift Exchange 2020





	At Least He's Safe and Happy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nebulousviolet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulousviolet/gifts).



> The structure and line breaks of this fic are heavily inspired (read as: stolen?) from C's beautiful fic "castling" (https://archiveofourown.org/works/27213733), which I loved very much and wanted to pay an homage to in this gift for them. (In this case, please accept imitation as a genuine attempt at flattery, haha.) Alas, this isn't as thematically condensed as "castling," but that's how it goes sometimes.
> 
> Context Hint: Otto's POV shifts from the days after Escape Velocity to the days after Rogue throughout the story.

Even with a stepstool, five-year-old Otto Malpense could not reach the top shelves at the library down the street. The library closed in half an hour—plenty of time to read a few more books—but the librarians would be too busy with their end-of-day duties to help him unshelve the books. Otto had read all the books he could grab on tippy-toe; he’d have to try again tomorrow. He brushed the dust off his trousers and walked towards the exit. He was slightly taken aback when one of the librarians handed him a book—he knew that she believed he was only pretending to read. But she handed it to him. _Matilda_ , by one Roald Dahl. Too tattered to resell. A gift. That had never happened before. Otto read it seven times that night. That had never happened before, either. 

* * *

“You’re getting really good in combat classes,” Shelby said, corralling her freshly-washed hair into a ponytail. “I think the colonel’s impressed.”

Otto shrugged. “Yeah, I’ve felt different since… y’know.” 

“Definitely,” Shelby agreed, but her cheerfulness could not be dampened. “But hey, even being injected with animus has a bright side, right? You’ve gotten great at fighting, and you don’t even remember what happened these last few months!”

His mind’s eye jolted against the image of a woman in white swinging her metal hand at his face. Again. He tried to keep his breathing even. “Yeah. I just have to think positive.”

* * *

A lot had changed on Overlord’s space system. He lost a friend. He lost an enemy. And Otto felt lost, too. Not dead. But different. He remembered being five, when he had read a story about a magic girl who loved to read, and how they were just exactly the same—but that wasn’t true at all, was it? Though Matilda’s parents were wicked and sleazy they were, nonetheless, parents. She had been born. Otto had not. It seemed terribly pathetic to bother himself about something so distant from his current reality, but Otto could not stop thinking about it. Where did he come from? Who let this happen? 

At the orphanage, he had never allowed himself to daydream about idyllic parents who would whisk him away. He knew he wasn’t adoption material. But he had always assumed that, like everyone else, he was born in the usual way and given up for one of the usual reasons. This assumption was unfounded. Otto was not born: he had come to being in a clear glass jar from which he was scooped up with a little fishnet and sent via the post to St. Sebastian’s. Huh! (He was letting his imagination get away from him. He knew perfectly well they would not have scooped him up in a fishnet. There was no way to know what his first moments were like. Still, however much he tried, he could not shake the image of a tiny baby laying wet and naked and wailing beneath a bright light on a stainless steel table while shadowed lab coats with clipboards stood around him and scribbled down notes, indifferent to the noise.)

“Do you know the story of what happened the day you were born?” he asked Wing. He had not told Wing the truth about his relationship to Overlord. He was not sure he ever would. “If you don’t mind sharing, that is.”

Wing shrugged. “My mother said that she worked up until the day she had me. She was trying to finish some computer code before I was born, including in the hospital. When it was time to push, my father had to physically take the laptop from her hands.”

Otto tried to visualize the man he knew as Cypher in this role, but found he could not quite manage it. “She must be where you get your determination from.”

“I hope to live up to her name,” Wing said, but he did not look as sad as Otto expected. “Do you know anything about the people who put you up for adoption?”

Otto wished, suddenly, that he had his old copy of _Matilda_ on him.

“No,” he said. “The police never found anything.”

* * *

It was hard for Otto to forget that absolutely everyone else had parents. There was not a single other person in existence whose gestation took place in a vat full of amniotic jelly. He was not even sure if he should consider himself human anymore. A copy of a painting was called a forgery; was a clone anything more than a counterfeit person?

He found Nigel in the hydroponics lab. “Have you ever cloned a plant?” 

“Uh… yes?” Nigel said, trying to focus on his microscope. Otto watched him in silence for a few minutes. “Do… _you_ need help? Cloning a plant? It’s not hard.”

“No,” Otto replied. “Is cloning a plant considered stealing?”

“It kind of depends on the assignment.” Nigel looked up from his microscope, studying Otto with no small measure of confusion. “But I think you might have been watching too many movies. Cloning plants is really not that big a deal in the grand scheme of biotechnology.”

Otto laughed, or tried to. “Just wondering.”

* * *

“You doing okay there, Otto?” Shelby asked. She pulled out Otto’s seat at the lunch table for him. He sank into it gratefully. The others at the table peered at Otto curiously, but he was having trouble focusing on them. He remembered walking past a bakery with fresh bread that had smelled delicious, and then descending into the parking garage where he killed the woman in the elevator. He had not realized then that her screams would stay with him for a long time. 

“Just a headache,” Otto said. He was not sure how long he could keep up the pretense that he had no memories of the animus when it felt like memories were all he had anymore. Sebastian Trent’s gray gravel voice spitting endless orders. His training with Ghost, and the thought that she was the closest thing his lobotomized self had to a friend. Hopping from plane to tram to cab for the next murder and watching the body hit the floor as if through a stained glass window. The pain when he had to hurt Raven, then Wing. He touched his nose, expecting to find it bleeding, but that, too, was just a memory. He was fine. That was positive thinking. He was just fine. 

“You really look rather pale, Otto,” Laura said anxiously, watching him. “Maybe you should go lay down.”

“Don’t worry about me,” he told her. “I think I’ll just drink some juice.”

* * *

Nigel and Franz made a point of studying with Otto and Wing when they could. No one asked Otto outright if something was wrong, but it seemed clear that he was unhappy. Otto thought about the librarians who looked after him. At least he was safe. At least he was happy.

“How do you know you’re a boy?” Otto asked softly. 

Franz, at the time, was his only audience, and his expression suggested he had been caught in the headlights. “What?”

“How do you know you’re a person?” Otto continued. “How do we know we’re here at all?”

“Otto, I am not as smart as you,” Franz said. “I cannot tell you these things.”

Otto missed H.I.V.E.mind. He wondered what the AI would have said.

* * *

The closest Otto ever came to telling Wing the truth about himself was near the end of August, around his so-called birthday. He managed to say he was different—and then he couldn’t bear to continue.

“If it makes you feel any better, on a genetic level you are more similar than dissimilar to every other human being who has ever lived,” Wing said, sensing his friend’s distress.

“I think I’m missing something that makes me fundamentally human,” Otto worried. “Inside.”

Wing blinked. “That cannot possibly be true.”

“You sound so sure.”

* * *

Laura walked Otto to his room, a worried expression on her face. “Please, Otto. Tell us if it gets bad, please. With everything you’ve been through, it will take time.”

“I know it will,” Otto replied. At his room, he took a seat on the bed and looked at the opposite wall. He felt like crying, but he wouldn’t in front of Laura. She took a seat next to him and wrapped an arm around his back. 

“You’re not alone,” she said. “Remember that.”

“I know,” Otto said, leaning into her hug and wondering if this was the feeling she missed when she got homesick for her parents. “I know it’s all over, but even with the animus gone, I can’t help but feeling a little like Frankenstein’s monster.”

Laura smiled. “Green and afraid of fire?”

“Abandoned,” Otto said quietly. “And artificial.”

Laura shook her head fiercely and pulled Otto in for a proper hug, so tight he could hardly breathe. When they let go, ready to inhale again, she grabbed his hand and placed it against his own chest. “That’s your heartbeat,” she told him. “And that is something real.”

“The human heart will always be a mystery,” Otto said, a pedantic irony gleaming in his eye. Laura frowned. “But I think you’re right.”


End file.
